


Nightmare's End

by OrangBelanda



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Adamant Fortress (Dragon Age), Gen, Grey Wardens, Nightmares, The Calling (Dragon Age)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-11
Updated: 2020-09-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:02:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26404651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OrangBelanda/pseuds/OrangBelanda
Summary: The Inquisition freed the Wardens from the fake Calling. Now, a member of the order reflects on what happened as he stands on the battlements of the ruined Adamant Fortress.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 2





	Nightmare's End

It begins with dreams. Dark, twisted ones, like those you started with, that you thought you’d grown accustomed to, yet never realized that you’d simply pushed them deeper into the recesses of your mind. You wake bathing in cold sweat, but at first they simply pass, and you tell yourself that that’s all they are. Dreams. But as the days go on and the dreams keep occurring, they start to linger during the waking hours, too. You go about your daily business and the memory of them will be there, skirting the edges of your mind, out of reach and almost without form. Like an itch that festers right under the skin. Sometimes it’s so faint that you tell yourself you’ve just imagined its presence all along, but then, in those otherwise quiet moments, when you’re sat alone reading or standing guard in the middle of the night, it will be there again. It’s frustrating, at first. You think you might pull your hair out trying to get rid of it. You _would_ , probably, if not for the fact that after a while, you start to grow accustomed to it. Part of you even thinks you _understand_ it. Like a whisper on the wind. A murmur. Something almost sing-songy. Not something you can _hear_ as in, with your ears, but which lingers in your mind, like an old tune that you think you know from somewhere, and that, now that you think about it, might have always been there; that you used to just drown it out. What’s so bad about it?, you think to yourself. In a way, it’s actually quite beautiful. You wish others could hear it as you do. It pulls at you, urging you on to… _do_ something. Like a call to action.   
  
I walk across the battlements, the sun blazing down on my neck, my hands. Debris lies cooking in the heat. Haze troubles the sight of the mountains in the distance. I check the bodies of the fallen, already rotting in their armour. There’s almost too many. No, there _are_ too many. Every single one of them is a good soldier lost.   
We’d all begun hearing the Calling, simultaneously. That which drives us into the bowels of the earth and to our deaths. Panicked, distraught at the imminent destruction of our order, we made a deal with the devil. What fools we were. Retaliation was swift, the cost high; I wonder now if the alternative might not have been preferable.   
I find a broken sword amid the rubble. Grasping the hilt firmly in my hand, I feel the metal with my other - still sharp. Still useful, perhaps.   
  
Just then, a hair-ruffling breeze catches on the tattered banners hanging from the tower above me, making the metal rings clang against the stone. I look up. There’s another staring at me, wings raised atop her helmet. She waves.   
She’s down in a matter of minutes, helping me search the bodies. For a few moments, she stays silent, but then she turns to me.   
‘Calling’s disappeared, huh? Everyone’s in such a state. Whatever the Inquisition did, they did good. I have to tell you, it’s such a strange feeling to be waking up and there’s just nothing there anymore. No whispers, no singing, nothing telling me to go down below. I’m definitely not gonna miss that. At least not for a while, anyway. Not until we’re old, right? Well, someday.’ She laughs to herself, but it sounds hollow.   
‘That’s good,’ I say. ‘So what do we do now?’  
‘We celebrate, I think.’ She walks on over to the next body.   
‘Celebrate? What’s there to celebrate for?’   
I can feel her staring at me from behind the visor. ‘Survival, that’s what’s for.’   
She leaves an hour later.   
  
After the last body’s been checked, I walk on over to the edge of the battlements. From here, you can stare directly into the enormous chasm stretching across the desert, all the way down to where its depths are swallowed by darkness. _Someday_ , I think - and at the edge of that thought, something whispers back, so faint that it’s almost lost on the breeze, but undoubtedly there.  
  
It sounds like a song.


End file.
